Sela ducked beneath the wing and took a position opposite him along the stryker’s canopy. Frost had collected on the darkened slits of glass, obscuring the interior.
Veradin rapped the glass. Its sharp sound shattered the tense silence of the bay. There was no reaction from the pilot within. Sela adjusted her grip on the weapon.
Abruptly he hopped back to the hangar deck. He disappeared beneath the low arch of the wing. She realized he was looking for the emergency override for the canopy access. He must have found it because she soon heard his victorious shout.
They were treated to the hiss of escaping heated air from the cockpit. Ice fractured and fell to the hangar deck and a small column of steam snaked upward. The smell of charred circuits and burning plasteel filled the bay.
Sela climbed up on the stryker’s wing then recoiled. A baking heat emanated from the darkened interior. “Careful, sir!”
As the steam cleared, Sela could see within. Coiled in the close confines of the cockpit was the pilot, chest pitched forward against the yoked flight column. Veradin reached into the space and righted the body against the seat. The pilot’s head rolled limply. Long dark hair, the same shade as Veradin’s, obscured the pilot’s features. Sela felt her heart constrict into a cold knot even as the heat threatened to suck air from her lungs.
Veradin carefully brushed the hair back from the pilot’s face, but Sela knew already what she would see. The young woman’s peculiar jade green eyes gazed sightlessly up at the overhead lights.
Her. Erelah.
The captain dove into the cockpit, ignoring Sela’s cautionary shout. He straddled Erelah’s form, snapping open the safety harness that held her in place. He cradled her face in his hands.
“Erelah! Erelah! Wake up!”
Her eyelids fluttered. The girl’s lips moved in an inaudible muttering. He pulled her up. Righting himself, he looped her over one shoulder to climb from the cockpit. Beneath the bulky flight suit she appeared tiny; nothing more than a skeletal frame.
He collapsed to the deck and pulled her into a clumsy embrace. Sela stood over their awkward family reunion with her weapon still drawn.
“Help me,” he panted. “Get the medistat, Ty.”
Despite the cloying heat of the hangar, Sela felt that icy kernel in her heart grow.
All the time Erelah continued to mutter. The words made no sense to Sela, but she recognized their meter and inflection. Lineao had repeated the same prayer to the Fates relentlessly as he worked on Atilio’s body.
---
Sela stepped quietly across the threshold with the spare set of clothes, a disposable single suit found in one of the crew lockers. The garment was about three sizes too big for the waif-like Erelah, but served as Sela’s excuse for explaining her presence if the captain appeared. Her real reason was not compassion, but curiosity.
Erelah slept curled into a tight ball. Her back was thrust against the wall, her knees clasped to her chest. She had made herself into a small, dense point. Even the light and clarity of the room seemed to disperse in proximity to this strange young woman. Kneeling beside her, Sela placed the clothes on the bunk and studied the still, pale features of Lady Erelah, Last Daughter of Veradin. The soft shape of the face echoed that of Sela’s captain. High cheekbones, a delicately sculpted nose. The family resemblance was obvious, but the brother and sister could not be more different. Jon had said she was his junior by a few years, making her twenty-something standard. But she looked so much younger, like a girl. And nothing but a frail tech.
The Kindred ladies that Sela had briefly glimpsed on Victory days were aloof, gliding visages draped in gossamer and full of refined grace. If Jonvenlish Veradin was a brilliant guiding star then this one, Erelah, was a collapsed one.
“Your purpose. Identify yourself.” The voice was hoarse, but the challenge in it was plain. It came from beneath the snarl of dark hair.
“Commander Tyron.”
A sliver of pale face appeared above Erelah’s tucked-in knees. There was a surety to her voice that surprised Sela. “You came to stare, Commander?”
She stiffened. “The Captain is concerned.”
There was a frigid silence. Then: “Jonvenlish, the caring, dedicated brother.”
Since being taken onship, Erelah had spent most of her time asleep. Occasionally she would wake to utter a string of nonsense in Eugenes. This was her most coherent round of conversation yet. A shame Veradin had chosen now for rack time. But it was Sela’s opportunity to question her without his brotherly hovering.
How had she known to find us? That question was her priority.
“How did you—”
“How long have I been in this location?” Erelah’s jade green stare looked past Sela into the bleak corridor. She resisted the urge to follow the girl’s gaze.
“Slightly over sixteen hours onship. I don’t know how long you were adrift.”
The girl studied Sela.
She decided to prod again. “How did you get here in a stryker? There must be a support carrier—”
“The stryker…” Her eyes narrowed. “Where is it?”
“Safe,” Sela replied. Something was not right here.
“Where are we now?”
“Safe.”
Who was doing the interrogating? A sense of warning chilled Sela. It told her to keep the answers from this woman.
Perhaps Erelah had received more damage than they could surmise, but this was not how Sela had expected this conversation to go. A dark intent seem to radiate from the girl. It was in the unblinking stare and in the quiet, incongruously patient voice.
“Commander Sela Tyron.” Erelah’s eyes shifted back. Her pale lips stretched into a mocking smile. “Ty.”
A chill danced along Sela’s spine. She had not told Erelah her familiar name. Perhaps the captain had told her, but she doubted this.
Another unsettling silence stretched between them in which Sela felt studied, marked.
Then a tremor shook Erelah’s body. Her face sank beneath the mass of dark hair.
Had she lost consciousness once more? Cautiously, Sela touched the damp skin. The girl was like a furnace.
With an abrupt gasp Erelah crabbed back, pressing into the wall. She looked around the room frantically. “Don’t touch me!”
Sela fell back onto her haunches, surprised.
Her captain’s voice erupted from the doorway: “What the Fates! Ty!”
“What do you want?” Erelah sobbed, as if seeing Sela for the first time. “Who are you?”
She sneered. Was she truly that damaged? “I just told you—”
“What’s going on?” Veradin demanded, stomping into the room. He tossed ration wafers and a water packet on the foot of the bunk and frowned at Sela in accusatory silence.
“I was checking on her,” she blurted, climbing to her feet.
No way was she going to take the blame for Erelah’s theatrics. As if she would want to provoke this.
“Please don’t touch me!” Erelah begged up at both of them. “You don’t know! Just don’t touch me!”
This was not the same woman who had spoken to Sela moments ago. This was a panic-stricken waif. Erelah wedged herself into the corner and braced her arms against the walls. The confused expression on the girl’s face told her this was a person in control of nothing, not even her own mind, it seemed. If it were an act, she could not see the motivation for it.
Sela stepped back. “Did you tell her my name? My full name?”
“What?” He answered distractedly. “No. She’s barely been conscious.”
She knew my whole name. She knows what Jon calls me.
He turned to his sister. Despite her struggles, he pulled the girl to him.
“She is obviously distressed.” His voice softened as he began making hushing noises.
She watched them, two dark heads bowed against misery. Erelah’s sobs became a low mutter. Veradin rocked them back and forth, uttering crooning sounds.
He looked up at Sel
a over his sister’s head. “She hasn’t your strength, Ty. She is not a soldier. You have to understand that.”
Sela backed into the corridor. An ugly hitch filled her chest. It was a sensation she did not care to examine. She had been dismissed. She did not exist in their little world. She was the dumb breeder who could not even speak their language.
But Sela understood one thing. They had taken more than Erelah Veradin onto their ship.
17
I have done something wrong. Of that I am sure. But what?
When Erelah focused on the hazy scrim that obscured her memory, it refused to dissolve. But she was certain she had done something to earn that scowl of distrust from Tyron, her brother’s loyal soldier.
Whatever she had done, it meant that the door to her makeshift quarters, once a storage space, was now shut. And Erelah wondered: if she possessed the strength to shamble across the room, would she find the door locked?
Am I locked in? Or is someone locked out?
/That is because he does not trust you. Your own brother./
She cowered at the voice, only vaguely aware that it had no true sound, but had crawled through her head like the hasty needling whine of insects. Eyes squeezed shut, she pressed her face against the cold metal skin of the tired Cassandra. The ship’s obedient hum crawled over her, flooded her ears, rattled molars.
But Erelah could still hear her. Still feel her. Tristic.
/Your beloved sibling doubts you. His renegade soldier has his ear. Tyron tells him what to believe./
If she opened her eyes she would see Tristic pacing, hands clasped behind her crooked back.
Erelah whispered, clasping hands over her ears. “You’re not real. You can’t touch me now.”
/On that count you are wrong/
“Stop. Stop. Stop.”
It was her new litany, easily replacing any prayers to the Fates she might still tease from her tired brain. She cringed closer to the wall, striking her head against it, keeping time. Even that pain did not drive Tristic away.
“Get out of my head. You’re not real!”
Count to ten like Uncle used to teach. But that was for anger. Not for this. Not for warding off demons.
/I am more real than your so-called brother. You have nothing. You are nothing. He wants none of you. You only bring him ruin./
“Stop. Please. Stop.”
Tristic wanted to wear her again, her Erelah-suit. She would insert her essence like a hand within a glove.
Erelah pushed back. It was so hard.
She conjured cherished memories: Uncle, strong and tall, broad shoulders like mountains thrust up to the sky, sheltering her from the tangled bramble of choking half-thoughts. The endearingly bony-knuckled hands of Old Sissa covered by such soft skin that cooled fevers and calmed sickened hearts.
Harder, she pushed. And slowly, that pull began to loosen.
There was a tug, felt and unseen in that alien den nestled in her brain.
Panting she took in the room as it seemed to solidify around her.
The clawed panic in her chest subsided.
Tristic was gone. For now.
Somehow Erelah had pulled free, but she knew it was temporary. It had sapped her strength. Her brain felt as if it had been scooped from her skull, wrung out and then dropped back into place.
How long can I do this?
---
They left Newet by mutual, unspoken decision. Although it did require another brief journey by conduit travel, Sela saw the logic in it. They could not run the risk of an Enforcement squadron having followed Erelah.
Sela sat in the grav couch of the command loft and scowled at what she saw on the Cass’s battered screens and reads. This boat was a mess in more ways than one. In concert with the clamor of the beacons and tell-tales, she muttered under her breath. The previous owners had recoded much of the system to use Commonspeak programming and calculations. Yet, some of the basic, primary elements still relied on the Regimental parent systems. As Sela performed the calculations aloud, she faltered between the two languages when it came to tech-speak. If it weren’t bad enough that the decades old interface lacked the user friendly holo projections, she soon had learned that every entry needed to be checked twice, then converted.
Sela detested such tasks, not because she felt inadequate to perform them, but because they did not involve moving or doing.
Grot work!
Sela realized that she was sulking. But she was a decorated infantry commander and a child of the Regime, not some spineless frail tech. Bring Erelah up here. If she were the genius that her brother claimed, she could set this horrid little boat to rights. She could do something useful instead of sleeping or screaming insanity.
Sela felt her scowl deepen.
There was something insidious, possibly dangerous inside Erelah, but Sela had only her instinctual distrust to present to her captain, nothing more tangible. The girl could have learned Sela’s name by any means: an overheard conversation, perhaps.
Her attention slipped. One of the beacons flashed scarlet as it rejected her calculation. A quick rap of her knuckle silenced its bleat. There was a brief laugh from the hatchway behind her, inexpertly covered with a cough. Veradin.
She made to stand in his presence, but flopped back to the seat, with a startled grunt. The bench’s safety harness was still fastened around her.
Wonderful, Tyron.
“Sir.” Sela unclasped the webbing even as Veradin motioned for her to stay seated.
She stood, nonetheless. It was automatic. She could no more be seated in the presence of an officer than she could will the color of her hair to change.
“Sela,” he said quietly. “I want to apologize.” He looked down, as if he had lost his words on the deck.
“It wasn’t my place to address her, sir. I’m not one of you.” Sela shifted from foot to foot.
“Don’t say that.” He stepped closer. “It cannot be like that anymore.”
Stubble darkened the line of his jaw. Shadows had formed beneath his eyes. His moves were slow like a sleepwalker. Her captain, the man she remembered, had always seemed on the edge of action, as if he possessed some fantastic idea that he could barely contain. But that was gone, she feared, for good.
What message did the avatar have for you, captain? Why would it damage you so?
“Things are going to be different now, Ty.” He spoke haltingly as if fearing his own words. “They have to be.”
“I think I understand, sir.” This was it. He was going to make her leave.
“Do you?” he asked, as if he were asking himself as well. “Ty, I don’t expect you to—”
“You offered to leave me on a Eugenes colony. I found one in the navsys. Its two days from here if we avoid conduit travel.”
It was an agricolony with a minimal Regime police presence that would be easy to evade. Sela had teased its location out of the lobotomized navlogs after checking through dozens of later hacks added by the ship’s previous owners.
He looked up at her, as if what she said had surprised or hurt. “Don’t leave me, Ty. I can’t order you to stay, but I need you.”
This was not what Sela had expected.
This is what this man did to her. He always had her thrown off balance. Things that should make sense, didn’t. She could never really think straight where he was involved. It was a liability, yet she could not bear to be without him.
He was still talking. “But I have to tell you—”
Sela kissed him.
Surprisingly, Veradin responded in kind, his mouth forceful against hers. They were off balance. He fell against her. The rail behind the grav couch pressed into the small of her back. She slid her arms around his neck.
This was wrong. But Sela found that she did not care.
“Ty,” he whispered. His hands moved up to cup her face. “Mine.”
Sela nodded in ardent agreement, uncertain of her voice. It was not a matter of debate. Yes, she was his. She cou
ld deny him nothing. At first it had been duty that bound her to him. But now the thing that held her to him ran deeper than any blood debts forged on a battlefield. It was far stronger than Decca. It defied definition, but at that moment she would give anything to serve it.
“Ty,” he breathed. “It’s always been you, Ty. Always.”
“Captain.”
He drew away, sharply. His hands fells upon her shoulders. For a sickened moment, Sela feared he had changed his mind, realized what he was doing and with what, just a common breeder.
“No more ‘captain’ or ‘sir’,” he said, urgently. “Ty, I have to tell you something.”
Sela nodded, chewing her lip. Her blood raged in her ears. Drunk. She was drunk on him and in this moment. He could have said anything and she would not have cared.
He drew in breath to speak.
“Jonvenlish! Ferhdahk est damina nasci de haste!”
They both straightened, caught off guard under a nearly adolescent guilt.
Erelah slouched in the doorway, blanket trailing off her shoulder. The words she had uttered were in High Eugenes, but the tone had been damning. There was only one word that Sela recognized. Nasci. A crester’s word for breeder. From her, it sounded like a slur.
Sela glanced at Veradin. His expression was shocked.
“What did she say?” She demanded.
But her captain held up a staying hand. His attention was on his sister as he barked a reply in Eugenes. His tone full of reproach.
Erelah stiffened and her expression soured. Those strange, jade-colored eyes measured Sela.
Anger blossomed in her chest. Something had been said about her, of that she was certain. Breeder. Veradin’s angry tone had confirmed it was something she would not like. But what?
Erelah tilted her head as she spoke in that same perfect, clipped Regimental. “Would you like to know, Commander?”
Her voice was not a fearful warble as before. The collapsed star was back. Did the captain not see it?
“Erelah! Enough!” Veradin said sharply.
He stepped between them and spoke over his shoulder to Sela. “She is not well, Ty. She does not know what she’s saying… what she’s doing.”
Allies and Enemies: Fallen Page 14